Printz Winner: Ship Breaker

With as many of the teen librarians who have already read this book, I am amazed that no one blogged about it already. Ship Breaker by Paolo Bacigalupi was this year's Printz Award Winner. In case you don't know, the Printz Award is given to the best written book published for teens the previous year. It's selected by a committee of librarians. It's the teens' version of the Newbery Award.


So this year it's this book that won the award:

Nailer is a scavenger working on ripping cooper wiring out of old oil tankers. This would fall into the category of "Jobs you really don't want." Imagine crawling through the walls of a ship with the only light being LED paint painted on your face and as you sweat, the paint comes off. Claustrophobic, much?


After a city-killer storm, he discovers a swank's clipper (Rich person boat) and thinks he's got himself a Lucky Strike, but then he sees Nita, the swank girl who owns the boat. She's still alive and promises that her people will reward him richly if he saves her. But to save her, he has to go against his past, his father, and a whole lot of big scary guys. If he killed her, well, pardon the pun, he'd make a killing. What would you do?


Full of action, environmental destruction all around, and a cast of interesting characters. Quite a good book if I do say so myself.